The secret life of Robert Gates

Robert Gates’s tenure running the Pentagon might go down as the greatest performance in acting history.

On the outside, he was an even-keeled, plain-speaking former college president, one who declared to Congress he hadn’t returned to Washington to be a “bump on a log.” He cleaned house at the Air Force after an embarrassing nuclear weapons scandal and, most of all, righted the course of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — as much as any secretary of defense could.

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On the inside, according to an early copy of Gates’s new memoir obtained by POLITICO, he was apparently hating every minute of it. But he kept almost everything behind the poker face he’d learned to wear during decades in the spy business.

As early as his “bump on a log” confirmation hearing — staged specifically to cast him as the new sheriff in town, a truth-teller about the bleak reality in Iraq — Gates writes that he was thinking to himself, “What am I doing here?”

“The temptation to stand up, slam the briefing book shut and quit on the spot recurred often,” Gates writes. “All too frequently, the exit lines were on the tip of my tongue: ‘I may be the secretary of defense, but I am also an American citizen, and there is no son of a bitch in the world who can talk to me like that. I quit. Find somebody else.’ It was, I am confident, a fantasy widely shared throughout the executive branch. And it was always enjoyable to listen to three former senators — Obama, Biden and Clinton — trash-talking Congress.”

Gates seems to have fantasized about quitting as often as an intern wronged; he daydreamed about storming out of meetings and harbored deep resentments about Congress and both his bosses at the White House. In short, the Secretary of All Defense, as he’s known inside the Pentagon, the emperor of The Building — who at the time wielded a nearly $700 billion budget — was living the life of a Walter Mitty.

The obvious question is: Then why did he keep doing it? “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War” belongs to a subgenre of Washington memoirs in which the author emerges as the last honest man or woman in a capital beset by greed and ignorance. The book is also, in large measure, Gates’s attempt to answer the question of why on earth he didn’t quit if he felt he was surrounded by administration apparatchiks and congressional dolts.

One reason, he writes, is that if Washington was asking hundreds of thousands of Americans to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, the least he could do would be to answer President George W. Bush’s request to take over.

“When I was asked … I said that because of all those kids out there that were doing their duty, I had no choice but to do mine. The troops were the reason I took the job, and they became the reason I stayed.”

Staying, however, meant being miserable. The toll of killed and wounded from both wars, knife fights inside the administration, and dealing with interlocutors in Congress — whom Gates found insufferable — all wore on him. At the time, however, the old intelligence officer hid it well.

“The tone of what I’m reading now is a big surprise to me,” said retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, now senior military adviser to the National Security Network. “He gave such a professional demeanor. … I consider him a hero. He was dealing with all this turmoil, all this disagreement with the White House, but his professional display was spot on.”

Eaton said he hoped the headlines from Gates’s criticism of the White House wouldn’t distract too much from his accomplishments, including the way he prosecuted the wars after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gates’s emphasis on getting mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles, MRAPs, downrange when the troops needed them.

Thomas Donnelly, a defense scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, said Gates’s reputation could suffer because of the deliberate decision he has made to criticize a sitting administration rather than waiting until it leaves office. But Gates wouldn’t do so unless he thought the issues at hand were important, Donnelly said.

“This is not a guy who is looking to sell more books,” he said. “This is a 600-page book, and it’s not exactly what you’d call a kiss-and-tell bodice-ripper. It was obviously written in a reflective tone, not just as a score-settling thing. I think he’s a smart enough guy to figure this out and for whatever reason that’s motivating him, he’s willing to cross that line … If he takes a hit to his reputation, I think he probably is discounting it, saying, in his own mind, it’s worth it. The obligation to get this stuff out now outweighs the more traditional protocol.”

The White House is taking the high road in responding to Gates’s book. It issued a statement praising his service, defending Vice President Joe Biden and wishing Gates “the best” as he tours to promote his book.